Cats can squeeze through impossibly small holes, but how does their anatomy enable them to do this?
Cats are so flexible that a 2014 study half-jokingly investigated whether felines are liquids. But joking aside, traditional fluid mechanics can't explain the impressive contortions kitties can take when squeezing through small holes. So how do cats pull off these feats?
The shoulder blades and the collarbones are connected together in humans. The resulting shoulder girdle provides rigid support for the muscles of the arms, the NCBI noted.In contrast, the shoulder blades of cats are attached to the rest of the body only by muscles and not bone, according to the Catonsville Cat Clinic in Maryland. The same holds true for cats' collarbones, Nathalie Dowgray , head of the International Society of Feline Medicine in the United Kingdom, told Live Science.
In addition, cats' whiskers also help them squeeze through spaces. Whiskers are hairs that are twice as thick as cats'"guard hairs" and sit three times as deep within the skin, Dowgray said. Does their impressive flexibility mean cats are essentially liquids? Marc-Antoine Fardin, a physicist at Paris Diderot University, investigated that question in a 2014 study, for which he won an Ig Nobel Prize — a parody of the Nobel Prize that honors research that"makes people laugh, then think."—Why do cats 'play' with their prey?
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